The typical person acts at all cost to prevent negative feelings. However, an adept of the Dark side uses all thoughts and emotions for their purposes. We learn to accept feeling lonely, angry, and sad because they are our allies. Negative emotions, like physical pain, is an indicator that something is wrong. Only irrational fears are the exception, and those can be corrected for. Fear, for example, gives you heightened senses and extra energy to deal with a danger. In that, your body is operating perfectly and giving you exactly what you need in response. Yet, negative emotions are frowned upon by society because so many people operate so poorly when having emotional information course through their systems. As a result, the problems go unattended and people turn to pharmaceuticals to keep them happy. The six major religions do not help to understand emotions, as solving your own problems would rob them of their selling point. Most philosophical based institutions would also keep you a slave to your own emotions, but not I - not the Dark Aspect. Working with negative emotions are where we shine.

My three greatest allies were once my biggest flaws: Fear, anger, and depression. Fear I have already mentioned, but I didn’t tell you that I have none. Take me for my word here; I am not afraid to die; I am not afraid to live. It works like turning off the ability to be tickled. It took many years of thinking about my eventual death to achieve this. And, while in that state, fear is not my ally. I choose now to remain fearful. As a professional driver, it keeps me from falling asleep. I choose it just as I choose to live; I have forever to be dead. With anger I was a natural. In my youth it controlled me instead of me controlling it, however. I would throw the occasional object, which is infantile. Now I use for motivation to do work that I’m not excited about doing. I use it push me through on tasks that seem impossible. I have an irrational anger response to just about anything I don’t like, so I use it as well of energy. Depression helps me set my pace. It keeps me moving. I never enter it now as before, and get to work anytime I feel an onset of its precursor, frustration. My last anecdote is physical pain. At a former job I made office furniture, and I had managed to pull a muscle in my back. A coworker offered me some back-quell. If you are unfamiliar with this product, it is the largest dose of pain reliever that businesses can offer their employees in America. It is aspirin, ibuprofen, and an energy drink within two small tablets. So, I declined his offer. He, seeing that I was in occasional pain, asked why I refused to take it. I explained that my muscle hurt for a reason and that I needed to move slowly and cautiously for the next few days. I continued, if I take those I could continue damaging my back without knowing it. Pain had become my ally in instructing me how to lift and do various tasks of my job. This didn’t make it hurt less or become more convenient, but I returned to normal within three days.

In my experience, there are two primary ways of processing emotion: the trickle feed, and the flood gate. The trickle feed is preferred as it indicates that one is open to their emotions at all times. If you have reached that level of intelligence, then you can work on escalating levels of emotion by subjecting yourself to elevated potencies of stimuli. With flood-gaters, it works a little differently. They feel very little at all until a stimuli becomes overwhelming, at which time the gates open and their system completely dumps an unmanageable amount of emotion all at one time. This results in paralysis from fear, uncontrollable crying, etc. Unfortunately, people who flood gate their emotions self diagnose emotions themselves as the cause to their behavioral effect. But, this is not the case. By attempting to connect with their emotions on a continuous basis, eventually they become somewhat numb to the chemical inundation and start to resemble trickle-feeders as they cultivate emotional intelligence. It is a process that will not happen within a month, but continued persistence in feeling something, anything, eventually pays off in not having the dreaded overloads.